this koran survived a building collapse, the classic gee mat ric art work on its goat skin cover are still pristine on the back. >> 17th century. but this is the oldest one. 1114. the oldest one. reporter: a handful of collections like these have gotten support from universities and foundations in the west to catalogue, preserve and restore manuscripts. >> brown: for more, we are joined by mary jane deeb, chief of the african and middle eastern division at the library of congress. deeb was involved in the digital curation of timbuktu manuscripts with the help of one of the ancient city's librarians. the views she expresses here are own. first we want to be careful about how much we know or don't know, right? at this point, we're seeing some reports of some of these manuscripts have in fact been saved >> absolutely. this is the case in many wars. in iraq it was the same thing so at first they say everything has been destroyed. when we get closer we see that the librarians themselves saved the manuscripts. the owners and directors of those libraries, the people who work there are aware